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Friday, May 19, 2017

Partly it’s my contrary nature. Partly it’s fatigue from the
religious right. And partly it’s from having to read sentences like this, from
the chapter We Agnostics, in the AA Big Book.

If our testimony helps sweep away
prejudice, enables you to think honestly, encourages you to search diligently
within yourself, then, if you wish, you can join us on the Broad Highway.

Nothing offensive there, you think? Well, here’s another way
to put what the authors are really saying:

If you (the atheist / agnostic)
don’t agree with our testimony, you will be mired in prejudice, unable to think
honestly, unwilling to search diligently within yourself, and then, since
you’re so stubborn, you cannot join us on the Broad Highway.

See why I’m an atheist?

Of course, the truth is a little deeper. Even one of
the most famous atheists of our times—Richard Dawkins, author of The God
Delusion—has to admit that being an atheist is philosophically impossible. No
one can prove, logically, that God does not exist. What Dawkins can say is that
the existence
of God cannot be proved logically. Nor can the nonexistence of God…though,
according to him, the
evidence for God is damn flimsy.

And so I call myself, and probably will always call myself,
an atheist. And nothing I read in the chapter We Agnostics changed that.
Refuting the text point by point would render nothing, since the one thing I
took away from the chapter was that using logic to examine the question of God
was like using a thermometer to measure atmospheric pressure.

If words can be used at all for such a business, it’s poetry—not expository
prose—that will be of use.

And if not poetry, can I suggest its twin—music? And did you
know (as I didn’t, until I looked it up) that the medieval philosopher Boethius
believed that there were three types of music? There was the music of the
spheres or musica mundana, about
which Wikipedia
says:

Pythagoras proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all
emit their own unique hum based on their orbital revolution,[2] and that the quality of life
on Earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds which are physically
imperceptible to the human ear.[3] Subsequently, Plato described astronomy and music as
"twinned" studies of sensual recognition: astronomy for the eyes,
music for the ears, and both requiring knowledge of numerical proportions.

Sound crazy?
Well, to me the idea that celestial bodies in motion create sound is no more
difficult than believing that a cello string in motion creates sound.
What I have a hard time believing is that a Jew living two thousand years ago becomes
literally his own flesh and blood when I take communion of a Sunday morning.

So I’m willing to give the music of the spheres a pass. There
is, after all, the rising and falling of seas and oceans twice daily. We call
them tides, but what would Pythagoras or Plato call them?

The second kind of music is called musica humana, which Wikipedia calls “the internal music of the
human body.” And indeed, it was this internal music that I contemplated, as I
pondered my response to the chapter We Agnostics.

Let’s be charitable—though it goes deeply against my
nature—and say that the We Agnostics is dated. The chapter talks a good deal about aviation,
which in the late 1930's was still something to be wondered at (literally,
wonderful), though today it is wonderless.
But to me, no technological innovation or advance has much wonder about it,
especially in the long run. True, not many people thought human aviation
possible (though there was a guy called Leonardo da Vinci). But there were also
people astonished that the human body could survive moving faster than the
speed of the fastest horse, a century earlier. And then the train came along.

No, for me the logical counterpart for the music of the
spheres was the world of the body. And so I began to contemplate what a writer
of this time (2017) might say, if he were asked to write a word or two to
agnostics.

Forget aviation—think genetics.

There has been, I discovered, life on earth for some 55
million years. According to Wikipedia, human life evolved one or two million
years ago. Each human life has some 20,000 genes—and no one, as far as I know,
except for identical twins shares the same genetic expression. There is no one
in the world that is exactly identical to you or to me. We all accept that. But
the idea that we should ever have existed at all is less appreciated. It is, in
fact, as unlikely that you or I exists as it is that God exists. (Full
disclosure—I am not a biologist, and Richard Dawkins very much is. And so please,
anyone out there, do not send this to him….)

Put another way—I am the result of every genetic roll of the
dice that has taken place for 55 million years. And while it takes humans an
average of 20 years (perhaps) to roll that dice, less evolved organisms are
much faster than we are. Remember those fruit flies we all experimented on in
high school?

There is mystery when two people, besotted with love and
lust, take to their chambers and draw the bedclothes. And there is equal
mystery in the genetic interchange that gives new life.

And the mystery of the body does not stop there. The music
of the body, in fact, sings out unstoppably from birth to death. I am sixty,
and have given no particular care to my body, other than eating and drinking
going to the doctor whenever I had to. But my body, in fact, goes on doing
wonders of such a magnitude that we might call them miracles. There is, as I write,
a process called micturition going on in my body. And that means that my
kidneys have found a way to produce a golden substance—variously called urine or
piss—to deposit in my bladder. I accept this miracle as a nuisance, especially
at two in the morning, when one cat or other walks over my lower abdomen. A
person suffering renal failure does not.

Urine may not be a subject that interests you. Well, what about
dendrites? I looked them up, to make sure I wasn’t inventing all of this, and here’s
what I found:

A bit further down, the Google search lists an article that
starts with the information: the human brain contains one hundred billion
neurons. Some of these neurons—thanks, guys!—are telling my kidney to produce
urine, and perhaps how dilute or concentrated to make it. But a substantial
number of neurons have devoted themselves to getting me to the point where I
can write these words. My parents read to me, as a toddler, and that fostered a
love of books. My teachers told me that the body was made up of systems: the renal
system, the neurological system. Later teachers told me about the sympathetic
and the parasympathetic systems (or perhaps subsystems) of the nervous system.
And somewhere I read that the term “dendrite” was a (pay attention, here) “branching, treelike structure.” Oh, along the way, someone taught me to type
sixty words a minute on a typewriter. That, in itself, is a physiological
miracle—it wasn’t too long ago that opposable thumbs were a big deal. And
then someone invented the laptop, and the program Word, which truly comes in
handy, since my fingers do fly at the keyboard! Unfortunately, half of the words have
typos, and does anybody remember tearing the paper out of the typewriter, and
starting the page afresh?

All that is a miracle, of course, but remember those
“treelike” structures with their “branching?” I know a bit about trees, since
my mother lived in a forest. I know, I know—it sounds fanciful, something out
of a fairy tale, but it was true. And very often I would peer out of the window
in the back bedroom, and see the tops of trees swaying in the wind.

Is there any mother that does not cradle and rock her
infant? And is that why, among all sights in the world, swaying tree tops—black
against a darkening November sky, with the blessing of snow promised—is the most
comforting? At any rate, I amused myself, looking out my mother's window, by thinking that much the same thing
was happening in my brain. I too had a forest within my cranium. True,
infinitely smaller, but who is to say that it isn’t just as complex? One
hundred billion dendrites? How large would the forest have to be, to have one
hundred billion tree branches?

We used to think, of course, that trees did not communicate
with each other. Now, it appears, we believe that trees do, and one of the ways
is through those tree branches. But what if they didn’t? I glance at a man
sitting twenty feet away from me and peering at his cell phone. His lower arm
and his long, tapering fingers remind me of El Greco—how many dendrites, or
inner trees were involved in forming that simple thought?

Well, I believe in the music of the internal body as much as
I believe in the music of celestial bodies. I can see the trees swaying, and I
can feel the joy of thinking, and the two joys seem to me to be…well, one.

The axman comes, of course, and fells some trees. Or perhaps
it’s the tornado, the hurricane, the Caterpillar land leveling tractors. In my
case, it was a fall that came, and that bared a large portion of the forest of
my lower back. There, the dendrites were making the music of getting my feet to
walk, and even to dance.

I had fallen in the middle of the night; I had landed with
all of my weight on a stone floor (marble, yes, but still stone). I had spent
an unknown time lying stunned on the floor, not knowing what had happened to me.

Wrong, I still remember crying out loud, “Oh, I’ve fallen!”
Even now, I weep as I write these words. I knew minimally that I would spend
months in pain. What I feared, before the pain and the shock swept me into what
we call stunned…well, I feared I would never walk again.

It was then that I fell into the arms of “stunned.”

(Where, by the way, is “stunned?” I know how to get to—and
mostly how to navigate—“awake.” “Asleep” is a land I occasionally visit. But
what is it to be stunned? Is it that one set of neurons is firing so fast that
it brings down the system? Or is it another state—like sleep or wakefulness?
Will we ever know? And how would we study it, since to stun people is utterly
unethical? Though, of course, there is shock therapy….)

And so there I lay, on the floor, and whether I was lying in
God’s arms, or in a state of bardo,
or somewhere else…well, I cannot tell you. But at some point the pain called me
back to the world of the living, a part of which was the world of sickness. For
all of a sudden, I had a body! All my life I had been very much like the little M&M
creatures, and would have traded place with them in a second. There is no
reason, surely, for me to have so much leg and arm! My body, after all, was not
devoted to running races or dancing ballet. It was just there to carry my brain
to places—jellyfish, it seemed to me, were much better designed. Anyway, that
wasn’t the point. I was in pain.

No, I was in agony.

I am a restless sleeper: no position is right for me for
long. And for three or six months, it seemed that every time I shifted in bed,
the devil would spear my lower back with his pitchfork, which had been heated
in the hottest furnaces in hell.

In that time, I could not hear the third and last form of
music—remember music?—which is called musica quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis, which
is just as clumsily rendered into English as “sounds made by singers and
instrumentalists.” Though this is the music you and I both know, it was curious
that I couldn’t listen to it in all of those months of lying in bed. Nor was it
that I didn’t value it, or wish to listen to it. I didn’t, in fact, have the
strength for it. If turning in bed exhausted me, what would a Bach fugue do?

If I didn’t turn to music, perhaps music turned to
me. Late at night, after the day’s bottle of whisky had been drunk, I used to
imagine a sight I had seen only very briefly in my life.

In the months after my mother’s death, I had
thought of the idea of retreating to a monastery, where the eight offices of
the liturgical day
are observed and celebrated. And so I sat with five or six other people in a
church that could have seated a thousand, and watched five or six people—called
monks—enter, kneel, and sing chant. We call it Gregorian chant, and it’s been
sung for centuries, and is the wellspring for all of the music that came since.
Somewhere in the world, a group of men or women is singing every one of those
eight hours. And those chants have been sung for close to a millennium, and
will be sung for even longer.

There was no strength for me to come to the chants, and
so they came to me. At night, caught between sleep and awake, sober and drunk,
pain and release…I imagined those monks. I saw them in that Chicago church, and
they were singing, and my body was arrayed on a low table in front of the
altar. Or perhaps my body was the altar—at any rate, my head was facing
the crucifix, and the monks were encircled around me, clasping hands, and
glancing for direction at the abbot, who stood at my head. I report, for any
Vatican II holdouts, that he was facing the crucifix, as did the priests during
the mass before the reforms of the 1960’s.

This is the part of the story when I should tell
you that I felt a slight warmth—nor more than the heat of a candle lit half a
world away—in the base of my spine, and that warmth….

No, it didn’t happen that way.

The miracle was only that the pain ebbed and
waxed…but most ebbed. The tide had run out, and the sea had returned to its
level. I returned to such everyday miracles as waking up without pain, and
walking without wincing.

And drinking a bottle of whisky a day….

And did I tell you about the wine?

Which brought me to AA, and which brought me to a
chapter which smugly urged me to give up my prejudices, think honestly, search
diligently, and then join the other drunks-but-still-believers on the Broad
Highway. And if I am so snobby as not to prefer to take my God straight off the
rack, well, I can have a designer-made God! Even, according to something I read
about AA, if that’s the radiator on the fourth floor meeting room. It doesn’t
matter, as long as it’s a Higher Power!

That, of course, is completely ridiculous.

Bill W., of course, got the full Monty—the blinding
white light and presumably blaring trumpets. (If not 80 virgins….) And so I
have tried, at times, to trick my God into a little self-immolation. Or at
least torching a bush or two. He or She responds by mooning me—not
literally—but is otherwise breathtakingly generous and loving.

The Goddess—and have you noticed that there is no
“Goddess,” as there is “God?”—doesn’t speak to me with words, you see. Rather,
she speaks to me through the music of the spheres, the music of the body, and
then, the musica quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis. My
phone, happily, knows how to play this music, which is another little miracle.

And so when I had to cook up a Higher Power—and if
you know Spanish, you know that HP means hijo de…..—I sat in a funk. A
radiator wasn’t going to do it. And the Jewish guy, those 2000 years ago?
Definitely a better choice, though one could argue that people who believe in
radiators have caused less trouble…. Anyway, I’ve been worrying about God much
as my cat worries the smelly underwear it retrieves from the laundry hamper.
I pondered and pondered.

It was too much. And that’s when my phone began to
speak to me, or perhaps it was God, or maybe this morning it was just Cristobal
de Morales, since if God and telephones can speak or play / sing music, well,
why shouldn’t a man born 517 years ago, and presumably dead, do the same? So I
turned away from relief at having to worship Jesus or radiators. I listened to
the Officium Defunctorum, or the Office for the Dead, though today it
just felt like Office for the Defunct. Defunct being sort of what I am. True, I
wasn’t terribly funct when I was hitting the sauce, but an alcoholic
without his bottle is definitely defunct.

Well, I less listened to the music than I raptured,
and then I began to see my way—which is my way only, and which you can
completely ignore without being called prejudiced, intellectually dishonest,
incapable of diligent self examination, and curiously defiant to cruise down that
Broad Highway.

In fact, you may not like de Morales at all….

God does not speak to me.

Rather, She set out the music of the spheres and
then the music of the body, and then She opened heaven, and out poured the musica
quae in quibusdam constituta est instrumentis. You know, the music my phone
knows how to play.

And that I—greying, drunk, and broken-backed—am just
learning to listen to….

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!